[KoJ] Chapter 101: Hollowed Core

The spatial tear snaps shut in an instant, returning space to a single sheet of undisturbed fabric. The Titan is not so lucky.

When you live entirely on one plane of existence, then you rely on that plane to remain in existence. Even if I cannot truly harm this hyena with my fangs or scales, I can hit it where no creature can avoid. I can strike the ground it stands.

Just so long as I ignore the frailty of that ground, and the terror of what lies beneath.

Growling at the pain, the hyena sweeps a claw at me. I’m already gone, but those eyes follow me with vicious clarity. The wound cuts deep through the creature’s side. Muscle, fur, and bone alike simply removed from the Titan’s body, yet it moves unhampered. Where blood should fall, tar flows instead.

Breaking reality once isn’t enough to take down a Titan. I’m not surprised. But I’m also not going to enjoy shattering the fabric as many times as will be needed.

The Titan takes a hesitant step back. For the first time, the beast expresses wariness. It now knows I am not as much of a free meal as it had originally thought. Surrounded by natural distortions, and with a deadly weapon at my disposal, I am no longer the prey.

Before the hyena can question its decision to chase me down further, I strike. Another rift severs. The Titan feels the shiver of spatial fabric, and leaps out of the way. Unfortunately for the massive beast, as the tear explodes into reality for a brief instant, its peripheral branches nick its tail. The tip severs.

“What is this?” the Titan hisses. “How do you hurt me?”

Apparently it cannot see how the fabric tears, only the resulting damage. Then its reaction to the destabilised rends must be instinctual. To the Titan, it must seem as if the wounds simply appear from nowhere; an attack without preamble, and little warning.

I strike again. This time, the Titan slips away unscathed. Once more, my gaze is pulled to the endless expanse beyond our fabric.

It is already blatantly obvious how much weaker our fabric is than any of the others, yet the weakness is not evenly woven. Some places are worse. Frayed. And the deeper I gaze, the more I realise how threadbare it is below the surface.

The hyena tries to back out of the environment that suits me, but now it’s my turn to cordon off it’s escape. With how large its torso is, that is the obvious target for my rift-shattering attacks. The Titan doesn’t make it more than a body length. Any further, and its heart would shred to ribbons in its chest.

I create three, then four in a row. The trap is successful, and now the walking mountain hesitates to flee. Its eyes shift between myself, and the air around it, trying desperately to analyse exactly what it is I’m doing, but without True Sight, its an effort of futility.

Unfortunately, such spatial destruction is not so easy on myself. I suppress the urge to stop moving. There can be no sign that such attacks exhaust me as much as they do; the hyena is sapient, and will use the information against me. If I could take my time to destabilise each rend and rift, it might not be so difficult, but that would only assure each attack misses. I need to sever each distortion’s connection and drive it to the point of ripping itself apart in as short a time as possible to confirm a hit.

The mental fatigue accumulates… but it is unavoidable.

With its escape route blocked off, the hyena glares across the field of distortions that is my safety. “You realise that even if you happened to kill and consume me, that Akkorokamui’s Mandate will apply to you? The Colossal will hunt you down.”

“I do not care.”

“Then you have not felt true fear. You have not witnessed a Colossi.” Its tone is almost pitying. “But you will never have the honour. This… trick of yours is intriguing, but do not think I will allow myself fall to one barely a tenth my mass.”

The Titan lowers its head and stalks forward. Tar floods out from its fur. Now in the depths of warped space, I have no issue avoiding the beast, and it knows it. The Titan follows at a relatively languid pace. Each distortion impeding the flow of tar instead spreads it in all directions. The black substance mixes with the churning earth. Fountains fall from the sky far in each direction, only to become another origin point for the spread.

It is not difficult to understand the hyena’s goal: there’s no point in chasing me down when I have all of space on my side, so it intends to steal the options I have from me.

Unfortunately for the Titan, I can read the warped fabric better than any other. No matter how much tar it spreads, or how many rends it infects, it can never cover the great vastness of all warped space. I will never be trapped.

All too easily, I slip out from the expanding ocean of tar into unburdened land. The moment I do, they Titan pounces. Not at me, but the last place I was. The rend shatters beneath the massive beast’s claws, even as a tear in the fabric gouges a deep wound through the side of its face.

Only when the hyena twists and bounds back towards the undistorted lands — helped along by the tar already laid — do I realise I was not its target.

I scan the options I have before me. To get away from all the tar, I took a rend that carried me quite the distance. Now, with that rend destroyed, I can’t return instantly. It takes me but a moment to find the fastest return path, but even as I slither through with enough speed that fissures appear in the air, it’s almost too late to stop the beast.

As I return to a landscape drowning in tar, I immediately sever the two end-points of a hole. The tear won’t be as damaging as a shatter of the more intense rifts or rends, but it is much easier for me to pull off with speed.

The Titan’s ear twitches, and before its next leg can even crash through the earth, a mountain of tar cradles its body and flings it my way. Straight towards the other half of the hole.

By the time it realises its mistake, the spatial tear has already scored a deep hole through its jaw. At only a few metres wide, the broken spatial fabric should barely harm the Titan. A mere pinprick. But the hyena’s momentum carries the tear through teeth and jaw, through the neck, and scraping out along the spine.

If only I had destabilised a rend instead.

For the cleanest strike I’ve managed in this fight, the tear lacked enough punch to end it. The Titan remains standing. It barrels towards me, almost uncaring for the hole of flesh hollowed out.

I try to dive back through the rift I came; the encroaching tar cuts off far too many of my other options to escape. I’d expected the tear to scare the Titan back, or at least slow it down, so as it crashes through tar soaked earth, I scrambled to pull my tail through. Long streaks of tar flow from the hyena’s jaw, salivating at the mere thought of consuming me.

When its mouth snaps shut with enough power to obliterate an entire sapient city, my tail — not fully through the distortion — severs. The Titan’s teeth don’t even touch my scales. As the immense mass crashes down on my rift, it is forced to collapse. My scales are usually strong enough to hold out against a collapsing distortion, but with so much external pressure being applied, the spatial rift slices through me as easily as if it were a tear itself.

The spike of pain that runs up my spine is nearly unbearable. A hiss bellows from my throat. Pressure laden with agony sweeps the base of the Titan Alps. I clench my jaw and move on, punishing the Titan with another spatial tear through its side. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost the end of my tail, and if I survived then, I’ll survive now.

My severed flesh is gone down the hyena’s gullet without so much as a bite. The being raises its head, and a chittering cackle rings though the distortions, bouncing around me and pressing into my wound. The pressure taunts me. My hiss fights against it, but I’m once more reminded that a single moment of carelessness will be enough to end me. This Titan may not be able to see through spatial distortions, but it has who knows how many millennia of experience to hone its instincts.

I can’t be the only creature its seen able to manipulate space; Sciacylch exist. Though the question remains if any have reached the strength to actually gain notice from a Titan.

As our battle continues, I have to balance my offence to keep the hyena locked in the environment that suits me, and avoiding as much of the ocean of tar as I can. My best option is to keep forming chains of distortions where I can, but the moment tar seeps into one link in the chain, it becomes useless. Not to mention when the Titan tries to pounce on me the times I have to get close to establish the links; it simply destroys all chains I’ve created.

This back and forth slows the Titan, but eventually it will escape the warped region and my advantage will be lost. My approach changes to many smaller tears. The larger ones are more effective, yet the hyena’s instincts are good enough that it has been able to avoid most. Each subsequent tear in the fabric hacks away at more of its body. While each strike is small, the accumulated damage is more than apparent.

Tar oozes from countless holes across the Titan’s body. Half its snout has fallen off. And one lucky broken rift’s branching tears sliced through two hundred metres of bone and cartilage at the ankle of the hyena’s foreleg. Despite coating the nearly severed paw in tar, the beast no longer puts weight on the leg. Something worth celebrating.

Well, it’s still far too early to be hissing out a victory cry. Not only is the Titan still walking, but what I see through the numerous tears leaves me stressed.

The fabric is weakening as the fight goes on. With each tear, the local fabric frays. The more we move around, the easier it is for the surrounding fabric to compress the broken parts back into the natural weave, but when we linger, the tears take longer to heal. That is both good for my fight, and terrifying at the same time.

Yet that isn’t what concerns me most.

Each step… each movement of the Titan affects the fabric. When the hyena pounces on me, shattering dozens of distortions in the attempt, the fabric is stretched to its limits. It explodes outwards in all directions. Usually the wave dissipates with enough distance, but downwards… the effect grows worse.

Down further, where the fabric is weaker, space looks like it is about to be torn to shreds. The hyena’s are hardly the sole culprit. Dozens of other Titan’s movements combine deep in the earth in a continual tug at the fabric. Only at a certain depth do they fizzle out. They hit a wall. Even to my eye, the space beyond our realm looks strange, but I can see how the disorder of Titans — and some of my own — are impeded by a soft, rhythmic pulsing. The repetitive flow contorts the tumultuous waves into something with order that slams to a halt against something impenetrable.

Within that spherical border, the fabric has already shattered. Each of the other realms have bridges to that point; they latch on like leeches, desperate to suckle on the realm’s little remaining blood. Only a thin leaf caught in their fangs holds back the flow.

Finally, the hyena makes a mistake.

It makes a desperate play to catch me off-guard, only to run itself through with a hundred metres of arcing spatial tears. Straight through the eye, eviscerating a good chunk of its neck, and tearing off the already injured foreleg as it tries to flinch away. The Titan hits the earth.

With great difficulty, the Titan flails to its feet again. A choked growl rumbles from its chest, but it now sounds pitiful.

“If you kill me, the other Titans will hunt you down.” It tries to hold its intimidating air, but it only makes it seem weak.

“I know.” And I will welcome them.

As I slip through the air before the hyena, something in its eyes change. “Consume me, and the world will shatter.”

I glance down. There’s no tear to peer through, but I can still imagine the weak fabric that barely holds this world together.

“I know.” My eyes snap back to my prey.

The Titan, lost to cowardice, discards any remaining sense. It flees. Limping on three legs, it bounds away from my territory.

I know what will happen should I kill the Titan. For my home, for disgusting rule of the strong, for Scia… the Titan will die.

A rend destabilises, and I hollow out the hyena’s heart.

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Ok, i'm going away on friday, so don't expect any new chaps for two weeks (sorry, I know this is quite the spot.)

I've had plans for this moment for like 3 years now, lol. hope it impresses when I'm back :D